PIA07806: Rhea Occults Saturn

The slim crescent of the moon Rhea glides silently onto the featureless,
golden face of Saturn in this mesmerizing color movie. In an interplay of
contrast and shadow, the moon goes dark against the planet, and then its
crescent suddenly brightens as it slips in front of Saturn’s night side.

This view looks down onto the unlit side of Saturn’s rings, which cast
soft, linear shadows onto the planet’s northern hemisphere.

The movie was created using 60 images taken using red, green and blue
spectral filters over a period of about 45 minutes.

The images were acquired by the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on
March 21, 2006, at a distance of approximately 221,000 kilometers (137,000
miles) from Rhea. The image scale is approximately 13 kilometers (8 miles)
per pixel.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European
Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages
the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The
Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and
assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space
Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.